Conservatives champion it. Liberals loathe it. But both sides have distorted the cause, and students are paying the price.

Larry Downing/Reuters

Bill Cosby and Dick Morris
presumably disagree about most things, so it's instructive to note that both
have officially endorsed "School Choice Week," which began yesterday with a series
of rallies and events around the country celebrating the idea of parents being
able to decide where their children go to school. Indeed, school choice seems
like such an obviously good idea that the most interesting thing about School
Choice Week is why it exists at all.

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That school choice is valuable is
beyond dispute. That's why there's a multi-billion dollar private school
industry serving millions of students. And it's why there is a much larger
system of school choice embedded in the American real estate market. While some
parents pay school tuition directly, many more pay it through their monthly
mortgage and property tax bills. Anyone who has deliberately purchased a home
in a "good" school district is, by definition, a beneficiary and supporter of
school choice.

Because school choice is so
dependant on financial means, students from well-off families are much more
likely to attend schools that have both high overall levels of quality and are
tailored to their specific educational needs. These are the same children who,
studies have shown, also experience much more enriching educational
environments outside of school than their less privileged peers. In
combination, this goes a long way toward explaining the persistent educational
achievement gap between rich and poor children that haunts American education.

At its best, the school choice movement is dedicated to
leveling the educational playing field by giving more parents access to choices
they can't afford in the free market. Who could object? Plenty of people, as it
turns out. This disagreement is a major impediment to achieving education
justice in America. School choice is a perfect example of a fundamentally sound
public policy idea that has been corrupted by a combination of ideology and
naivete.

... giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified
maximum sum per child per year if spent on "approved" educational
services. Parents would then be free to spend this sum and any additional sum
on purchasing educational services from an "approved" institution of
their own choice. The educational services could be rendered by private
enterprises operated for profit, or by non-profit institutions of various
kinds.

Friedman, as we all know, was enormously influential in
shaping conservative economic thought. But it took a long time for his
educational ideas to become embedded on one side of partisan lines. In the
early 1970s, liberal education activists openly promoted the idea giving poor
students Friedman-like vouchers in order to help them escape dysfunctional
urban school systems.

But at the same time, the Republican party was in the
midst of shifting toward a new brand of free-market, anti-government ideology.
As Ronald Reagan was elected on a platform whose education planks were
voucher-focused, school choice became an issue like abortion or gun control
that people learn to be stridently for or against based on their larger party
affiliation.

The fact that that the likely recipients of vouchers were
either religious or non-unionized private schools made the divisions even more
acute. For Republicans, vouchers were a way to be pro-God, pro-market and
anti-labor all at the same time. This proved to be such a satisfying
combination that many conservative politicians have never bothered to adopt any
other discernible position on public education. Similarly, liberals could use
vouchers to support their union allies and fight for the separation of church
and state.

Such deep political trenches made school choice legislation
difficult to pass. To this day, vouchers are only available to a small handful of
students. Then, a decade after Reagan's election, school choice manifested in a
new idea that was designed to address many of the obvious weaknesses of
vouchers: charter schools. First conceived in Minnesota and given a crucial
"New Democrat" endorsement by Bill Clinton in the 1990's, charters have since
expanded across the nation.

Charter schools are public schools accountable through a
contract or "charter" to public bodies. If they fail to meet the terms of the
charter, they can be quickly shut down. Like regular public schools, charters
are accountable for student scores on standardized tests under laws like the
federal No Child Left Behind act. Unlike private schools that pick and choose
their pupils, charters are open to all students and allocate scarce openings via
lotteries. The large majority of charters are run by non-profit organizations
and thus harder to charge with profit-taking at the expense of public schools.

Yet charters, too, have become charged with ideology.
Efforts to create them have often met with staunch resistance from teachers
unions and other organizations representing traditional public schools. Many
liberals see charters as little more than vouchers in sheep's clothing, another
plot to privatize and undermine public education. So charters, too, have been
slow to spread in many states.

That's why this week is School Choice Week. While school
choice has steadily advanced over the last two decades, primarily through the
expansion of charters, the fact remains that the large majority of middle- and
lower-income parents don't have any meaningful choices for their children.
They're stuck with local schools that too often range from inadequate to
shockingly bad, and they can't afford to buy access to better ones.

Changing this will require a lot more in the way of
discipline, good faith, and smart thinking on both sides of the ideological
spectrum. Many conservatives have proved more interested in using vouchers as a
political club than actually making them work on behalf of students. Students
participating in the longest-lived and most well-studied voucher experiment, in
Milwaukee, score no better on standardized tests than similar students who
attended regular public schools.

Indeed, vouchers have become so tainted in discussion and
practice that many conservatives now favor re-branded voucher programs that
work through the tax code: Instead of getting a voucher for X amount of money
to attend a private school, you get a "tuition tax credit" for X amount of
money spent to attend a private school. A variation on the program was created
in Arizona granting taxpayers a dollar-for-dollar credit for "donations" to
private schools. This soon spawned a corrupt system of log-rolling wherein
private school parents gave donations to schools on behalf of each other's
children.

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The legislation, moreover, required that donations be
funneled through "non-profit" middleman organizations run by, incredibly, the
very same state legislators who wrote the legislation in the first place. These
selfless public servants then skimmed off some of the money to lease luxury
cars for themselves, give jobs to relatives, and rent space from for-profit
corporations they owned. Making free government money available with no
oversight turns out to have some drawbacks.

Indeed, both vouchers and tax credit programs suffer from
the same underlying design flaw: they trust parental choice in a free market
to, by itself, ensure that students will attend good schools. Notably, even
Milton Friedman thought this was a bad idea. That's why he proposed that
vouchers be limited to "approved institutions." He didn't spell out how
approval would work in much detail, but the smartest balance between
flexibility and accountability looks very much like the process charter schools
are subject to today.

Yet conservatives have continued to flog vouchers and tax
credits for obviously partisan reasons. This has led to the spectacle of
national attention given to the "D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program," a small,
benign, and not particularly effective effort that at its core is nothing more
than its name suggests: a program that awards scholarships to a small group of
poor families to partially offset the cost of attending private school in a
medium-sized mid-Atlantic city. But because that city is the nation's capital
and the scholarships are understood to be "vouchers," no less than Speaker of
the House John Boehner threw his weight behind legislation expanding the
program last year.

These tactics only work if liberal interest groups take the
bait. And to their discredit, they have. When Democrats last took control of
Congress, they were pressured by national teachers unions to cut funding for
the Opportunity Scholarships, for precisely the same political reasons that led
Boehner to support them. So even as President Obama sends his children to
private school in the District of Columbia, Democrats were preventing poor
black children from doing the same.

The conservative Heritage Foundation, whose interest in the
welfare of disadvantaged children is normally confined to making sure that they
have less of it, gleefully plastered the Washington, D.C., Metro system with
pro-Opportunity Scholarship billboards in 2009 featuring a rainbow of minority
children and the civil rights-ish slogan "Let Me Rise." The whole debate is a
farce and an embarrassment for Democrats.

More broadly, liberal groups stand as the biggest obstacle
to the expansion of charter schools, even as minority parents line up for the
chance to send their children to charters and the best schools of choice
achieve results on behalf of poor children that are unmatched by nearby regular
public schools. Anyone visiting a good charter school built in a high-poverty
neighborhood--and if you live or work in Washington, D.C., there's probably one
within walking distance--will find people who have literally dedicated their
lives to improving the well-being of the disadvantaged. Denouncing them from
the left as con artists or agents of educational apartheid brings nothing but shame to progressive education policy.

So the challenge during School Choice Week, as well as the
other 51 weeks of the year, is to do more than just promote school choice, an
idea that, whether they realize it or not, pretty much everyone already
supports. The far tougher problem is to create a set of political conditions
that make meaningful school choice possible for a much larger number of
students than receive it today.

We can start by purging the worst rhetoric from the school
choice conversation. Dick Morris may support school choice, but Dick Morris is
also a repugnant ideologue who says that teachers unions are "thugs" who have "destroyed public education in America." Featuring him as a school choice supporter simply confirms the worst fears of
choice opponents. Liberals who aim similar vitriol at charter schools are no
better. Politicians on both sides of the aisle who use programs like the D.C.
Opportunity Scholarship as a political football are putting the interests of
children behind selfish political considerations.

Then we need to acknowledge that school choice has proven to
be a far more difficult idea to implement than its supporters originally
supposed. Choice requires both information and consumers who are well equipped
to use it. Schools are highly complex organizations whose workings aren't
always apparent at first glance. It's very difficult for parents who have no
personal experience of having attended a good school to pick and choose among
school choice options for their children. Looks can be deceiving--shiny new
facilities and well-organized classrooms can mask poor teaching and incoherent
curricula. Schools vying for students in the market tend, like any competitor,
to present a self-interested view of themselves. Parents need much better
information about school performance, and education in its interpretation, in
order to make good choices on behalf of their children.

They also need good schools from which to choose. Opening up
K-12 education to the free market does not magically conjure from the air organizations
that know how to educate children. Two decades into the charter experiment, the
number of organizations like KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) that have
consistently demonstrated the ability to build and run more than a handful of
high-quality schools can be counted on, if not one hand, certainly two. That's
why while results at KIPP are stellar, studies suggest that student performance
at the average charter school is often no better than at regular public schools
nearby. The school choice market requires major investments in the quality of
both supply and demand.

Even then, the market will still require strong oversight
from public officials to grant the "approved" status Friedman envisioned over a
half-century ago--and the willingness to revoke that approval when performance
is sub-par.

These are all achievable goals that, if realized, will have
lasting benefits for large numbers of children. But they won't be met if school
choice continues to be ghettoized as one of those eternal points of division
that ideologues would rather never resolve.

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